And Then He Use XScreenSaver

You know what else sucks about xubuntu? XScreenSaver. How do you even bork up a screen saver?

1: Like Thunar, it's just unbelievably ugly. Behold the default icon:

It's gigantic, and it's in your face whenever you unlock your computer. I laughed and thought it was some kind of bad joke. Unfortunately it's not, despite a quick google search revealing that there are masses of others that think it's ugly too. When people ask when will the year of Linux on the Desktop be, this is one of my favourite tidbits to point out, because it's included by default in many distros and it's an extremely noticeable feature of the system. Why does it matter? Because I think it's telling of the extreme lack of polish most Linux distros have. What kind of impression do you want to give a company or a person who is taking a serious look at Linux and one of the most noticeable dialogues has THAT icon on it?


2: It's unsecure.  When you let the computer idle and it switches off the monitor, if you move the mouse, no matter how long it's been idling, for about a second you can *see the complete desktop and all its windows* before everything fades to black and the login prompt comes up. And it gets better, if you put the computer to sleep, when it resumes, it doesn't ask for a password or anything. Dun doww. These are two issues that have arisen though daily use, I haven't even tried to play around with it.


3: It's difficult to get rid of. Just read this thread. I'm actually just going to leave it on my system because I can't be bothered

4: The developer is a total dick. Here's some choicest quotes from the XscreenSaver website:

"XScreenSaver is secure, stable, and mature; whereas gnome-screensaver is brand new, bug-ridden, unreliable, and a security disaster waiting to happen"

"They are, of course, welcome to shoot themselves in the foot in this way, but there's no reason you should. I don't support gnome-screensaver, and I encourage you to run xscreensaver instead"

"If that still brings you no joy, then I recommend switching to MacOS. I did."

and regarding the logo:

 "If you are looking in here because you're trying to figure out how to
   change the logo that xscreensaver displays on the splash screen and
   password dialog, please don't.  The logo is xscreensaver's identity.
   You wouldn't alter the name or copyright notice on a program that
   you didn't write; please don't alter its logo either."

how open source of him. The entire idea of open source is modifying and adding to programs that you didn't write.

I find the quotes about security hilarious given that I can see what's on a users desktop for a second before XscreenSaver kicks in, or how it apparently doesn't monitor when a machine is set to sleep. and that his solution to a known bug is to switch to MacOS. Nice.